» Turnaround: Replace the principal and at least half the staff, and give the new principal more flexibility in staffing, calendar, school day and budgeting.

» Restart: Convert or close the school, reopening it as a charter school or under outside management.

» School closure: Close the school and enroll the students in better-performing schools.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

Indiana is at the forefront of a massive national push, fueled by billions in federal aid, aimed at turning around the nation's worst-performing schools.

But after two years, the effort remains an ambitious work in progress.

Perhaps no place is a better example of that than Indiana. The state is pushing an unprecedented effort to fix chronically failing schools, either turning them over to private operators or using such operators as "lead partners" to work closely with schools. The grants have been a key tool for targeting the lowest-performing schools over the past two years.

The state is gaining national attention for that aggressive approach, but the strategy also exemplifies the difficulty in gauging the effectiveness of the federal program.

The Indianapolis Star participated with 20 other news organizations and affiliated journalists in a collaborative reporting project to assess the effect of the grants nationally.

The results are inconclusive, in great part because of the ambitious nature of the reform projects. It might take years to measure, in any meaningful way, the performance of schools in the program, especially those that are just now being taken over.

"There's evidence on both sides of the coin," said Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and a leading researcher on school improvement. "This is not the Oldsmobile of comprehensive school reform. . . . (This is) a souped-up model coming hard and fast and getting big changes quick. . . . The big question is whether those changes are going to lead to improvement."

What is not in doubt is what's at stake: billions of dollars nationally and tens of millions here in Indiana, where state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett hopes to change the fortunes of thousands of Hoosier children who attend schools that have failed for years, sometimes decades.

"This may be one of our most important initiatives nationally," Bennett said. "We must make the most aggressive and sincere effort to turn around our lowest-performing schools."

The School Improvement Grant program began somewhat modestly as a component of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, with its total funding never exceeding $500 million -- less than one-half of 1 percent of current education spending overall.

But the program was supercharged in 2009 by a $3 billion windfall under the federal economic stimulus program. That infusion jump-started aggressive moves by states and districts.

To earn their share of the money, however, states had to quickly identify some of their most academically troubled schools, craft new teacher-evaluation systems and carve out more time for instruction, among other steps.

The U.S. Department of Education uses its own formula to divide the money among states. Each state then uses federal criteria to choose schools and determine how much they will receive.

Indiana already has spent about $18.3 million in federal SIG dollars on 12 schools over the past two years. The U.S. Department of Education has allocated an additional $9 million for Indiana for a third group of schools this summer, which will raise annual SIG spending here to more than $27 million annually.

With the flood of cash has come new, tighter strings. Schools taking the money have to adopt one of four stringent improvement models. In most cases, the principal and much of a school's teaching staff are replaced. A school can be converted into a charter school, turned over to an outside management organization -- or even shut down.

Federal officials defend that approach. They say that in the past, states failed to pick rigorous turnaround options -- such as taking over a school or turning it into a charter -- when given a broader menu of choices.

"Schools literally got worse," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "The children that need the most help, the majority of them, got less help than before. That was absolutely crazy to me; that's what I was fighting against" in overhauling the SIG program.

Still, states have mostly chosen the mildest option, called "transformation," which removes the principal but otherwise just reorganizes troubled schools while leaving decision-making in the hands of local school officials.

Not Indiana. Here, the state has a majority of its SIG schools using the tougher "turnaround" model, requiring a new principal and replacing at least half the staff.

"We are rewarding those who are willing to go bolder," said Jim Larson, the state's director of school improvement and turnaround.

Going forward, the state also is embracing an even more rarely seen tough-love approach called "restart," which in this case includes direct state takeover of persistently failing schools. That will happen next year for the first time when four Indianapolis schools and a high school in Gary are taken over.

Those five schools will join a dozen others in Indiana already receiving SIG funds of $500,000 to $2 million annually.

Of those, seven are following the turnaround model, and five are trying transformation.

After two years, Indiana does have some successes to tout, Larson said. All 12 schools were picked because they had received an F from the state for at least four years and faced potential state takeover if that trend continued two more years. But after receiving SIG money, all but two improved enough to move up to at least a D and get off the list.

One of the other two -- IPS' George Washington Community High School -- avoided state takeover even after six straight F's because state officials thought it was improving and assigned a "lead partner" instead. Only IPS' John Marshall Community High School still faces state takeover if it can't raise its grade to a D this year.

Four local schools have raised their grades with the help of SIG funds: Harshman Magnet Middle School and School 69 in IPS and two Indianapolis charter schools, the Challenge Foundation Academy and Metropolitan High School.

The state's approach has been to pair SIG schools with organizations such as Pearson, a national education consulting company that offers support on everything from management to curriculum.

Larson said the goal now is for such outside groups to identify and help address weaknesses in the schools' instructional methods.

"We don't want anything off the shelf from them," Larson said. "We want them to work for the schools. We're asking, 'How can you be an extra set of eyes in the classroom?' Then we're shaping the scope of their services around the schools' needs."

The state Education Department makes three visits per year to each school in the program. Success is judged on such factors as state test scores, teacher and student attendance and discipline rates.

Indiana is a prime example of Duncan's wish for tough intervention in the lowest-performing schools.

"If we are the poster child, I'm very comfortable with that," Bennett said. "Tinkering around the edges hasn't worked."

Nonetheless, the program has been reviled on Capitol Hill from the get-go as Exhibit A for those arguing against federal overreach in K-12 education. Congressional critics -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- assail what they see as arbitrary staffing requirements, a lack of options for rural schools and a wobbly research base. The program is almost certain to receive an extreme makeover.

But Bennett hopes the program continues. He's not alone.

"Overall, I'm optimistic and positive about the grants," said Mark Coscarella, assistant director in the Office of Education Improvement and Innovation at the Michigan Department of Education. "I think we've seen schools really take on the challenge of making some really important improvements."

Alyson Klein is a reporter at Education Week. This story was produced in partnership with Education Week, The Hechinger Report and the Education Writers Association, with reporting from journalists at local news organizations across the country.